Christopher J Osborne

Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 (51B)

Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 lens Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 lens mounted on a Pentax Super A

This lens was introduced 1979 as one of the first Adaptall 2 lenses. Today 17mm might not seem very exciting, but in 1979 it was quite an exotic focal length. Few third-party lens companies had a lens quite this wide in their line up. This lens does not have a filter thread, but it came with a lens hood that took 82mm (these hoods usually got lost and are now very hard to find!) and also has a selection of 3 built in filters. The adaptall-2.com website lists these as: 81B (a warm up filter for colour photography), 80B (a blue cool down filter, again for colour photography) and Y2 (a yellow filter for adding a little contrast in b&w photography). But my copy replaces the 80B filter with an R80 filter (a red filter for adding dramatic contrast in B&W photography). In other words there were two versions: one aimed more at colour photographers and a second aimed more at B&W photographers.

Photographs taken with the Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5

This lens has a repuation for being somewhat middle of the road when it comes to image quality, which for most people (including me!) is good enough. All these photographs were taken using a Pentax ME Super on Kocak Portra 160 film.

Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 (51B) gallery - Image 1 Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 (51B) gallery - Image 2 Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 (51B) gallery - Image 3 Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 (51B) gallery - Image 4

Just in case you're wondering, I've no idea who the shirless man is in the last of these photos! He just wondered into my shot and I thought he looked quite… err… statuesque (!) so I left him in.

Links

Tamron SP 17mm f/3.5 (51B) on the adaptall-2.com website